Since watching the Apple announcement today and learning about the Mac Studio, I have never been happier that I did not wait for a more powerful Mac mini before I bought mine. The Mac Studio is more computer than I need and is out of my price range (for a desktop at least). I am thrilled that it exists for other people to use, and will happily listen to the pundits talk about for the rest of the month. For myself, though, the M1 Mac mini is more than enough, and the one I bought cost about $800 less than the least expensive Mac Studio.

The M1-based iPad Air is more relevant to me. I would love to hand off my current generation 4 iPad Air to my daughter and buy the new one for myself. I don’t need the performance for much, but for photo editing it will be a leap forward. I don’t think my daughter would ever go for this plan, though; my iPad Air is blue, not pink. I should have bought a neutral color.

I am excited to see what new Macs Apple announces tomorrow. I would love for there to be a new MacBook that follows the design language of the iPad Air, with flat sides, rounded corners, and anodized aluminum shells in several different colors. Ever since I got the generation 4 iPad Air I have wanted a MacBook that looks a little like two of them sandwiched together. For a little while longer I can dream that one will be unveiled tomorrow or later this year.

I am thankful for sun, warm weather, and my home office loudspeakers this morning. It’s going to be a good day.

🍴 My wife and I ordered Indian food tonight. That may be a non-event to most people, but for us it was a revolution. My wife never tried it before. I hadn’t had any since before she and I got married. We absolutely loved it and are still excited about it.

My wife was in a car collision this morning. She was uninjured but was understandably shaken up. I cancelled my morning meetings to go help her. Most of my help consisted of coordinating the tow truck and the body shop.

While this was happening, my son fell out of his chair at preschool, hurt his back, and was given an ice pack, and my daughter was sent to the school nurse on account of her chapped hands, which were bleeding.

My whole day blew up, but it was fine. My wife and kids are fine. The car is damaged and we won’t drive it until it gets fixed, but it will be fixed someday this month. I didn’t get all my work done today, but my coworkers understand that sometimes things don’t work out the way they are planned.

I gave a coworker some advice for giving effective presentations today. I told her some things worth remembering:

1. You are the star of your presentation, not your slide deck.
2. Structure the presentation around ideas rather than facts.
3. Make the presentation structure seem simple and obvious to the audience. One thing should always lead to the next.
4. It is better to present fewer concepts well than it is to present more concepts poorly.
5. Incorporate narrative into your presentations if you can. People love stories and are more likely to remember concepts that are tied to stories and anecdotes better than those that are not.
6. At the beginning of your talk, convince the audience members why they should care about what you are telling them. If they care, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.
7. A slide deck should not be a reference book. If you want to produce reference material for your audience, create a handout—which most likely should not be in the form of a slide deck—and give that to your audience during the presentation.
8. Each slide should be simple enough for the audience to understand it in a couple seconds. You don’t want audience members to be reading your slides when they should be listening to you talk.
9. Slides should contain no more than six items. The human mind can process up to six items incredibly quickly; it takes much longer to process seven or more.
10. Break up long lists into multiple slides.
11. Avoid making lists of bullet points. Instead, space out your items in an eye-pleasing grid (no more complex than two-by-three) and use meaningful icons for each item.
12. Full-bleed images and single, short sentences centered on an otherwise blank slide can be used to highlight important points and stimulate visual interest in the audience.
13. You are not going to read your slides while you present. Therefore, to keep on track during the presentation, write (and later refer to) speaker notes for each slide that cover your main points.
14. Rehearse the presentation until you can perform it by only glancing at your speaker notes.
15. Manage the clock well. Don’t let asides or questions from the audience take up so much time that you cannot cover all your material or properly wrap up at the end.
16. The best way to project confidence when hit with an unexpected audience question is to smile, speak slowly, and look toward your co-presenters for help.

My little corner of Micro.blog has not had much to say about the invasion of Ukraine. This is probably a good thing, because it provides me a respite from grim news and unsubstantiated reports from the front lines. If I still had a Twitter timeline to scroll through, I’m certain that it would be full of performative, meaningless platitudes¹, and strident back-and-forth arguments from people who (like me) have no bearing on the outcome of the conflict about what should be done about it.

All I can say right now is that the war is very upsetting to me and the news and commentary about it over the past two weeks (starting before the invasion) have been driving me crazy. Reading news reports and scrolling through social media has been especially disquieting to me. I know not everything I see is true. A lot of it is likely to be propaganda from one side of the conflict or the other. The internet is the best disinformation vehicle the world has ever created, and it is not only being used by Russia, it’s being used by Ukraine and everyone else, too. Ukraine may not be doing as well in this war as some of the video clips I have seen would lead me to believe.

Ukrainians are fighting a just war against an invading force, which makes taking sides in the conflict morally simple. Ukraine clearly does not deserve Putin’s incursion, and has put up a brave and savvy fight so far against it. It is easy to get caught up in how exciting and seemingly effective their defiance is, and to cheer them on in their defense of their democracy. But war is not an action movie. That it started already makes it a tragedy, and no matter the outcome it will end as an even greater one. The scrappy, virtuous underdogs may lose the fight. Their allies’ aide may be insufficient. Their charismatic leader may be killed. The two sides may broker a peace after heavy losses, and leave nothing meaningful resolved. Whatever the outcome is, I think we are all the worse for it.

Recently, I converted all of my (very old) academic writing from outdated document formats (WordStar and Microsoft Word 6) to more future-proof formats: either Markdown or OpenDocument format (.odt). While I did not re-read every essay I ever wrote for school during this process, I did notice something in my files that surprised me: From my junior year of high school to my final semester of grad school, I created outlines—full sentence outlines¹—for all of my papers that were over a few pages in length. I had forgotten that I used that type of outline for more than two important projects in my academic career: my first English thesis project and my last.

My first English thesis project, wherein I learned about the sentence outline

I was first taught (i.e., forced to use) a sentence outline in high school. It was a requirement of my grade 10 English thesis project, which was a 10-page research and literary criticism paper. At the time, I understood how to create high-level outlines pretty well, but could not understand why I would create an outline that contained full sentences of the essay I was trying to write. I figured that if I could write a sentence outline for an essay, I could just as easily (or more easily) write the essay itself. In grade 10, that is precisely what I did: I wrote the essay and then split apart every paragraph and every sentence into a hierarchical outline. In doing so, I learned almost nothing.

My last English thesis project, wherein I mastered the sentence outline

For my final English thesis project, my senior honors thesis in English at Brandeis University, I resorted to a sentence outline to solve my writer’s block. It was a year-long, independent study project, and my thesis advisor—who mostly told me that despite my anxiety I was doing fine—was not terribly helpful or available. Understandably, I lacked direction. I had no idea how to write a big, scary, and academically significant 80-100 page essay. When I sat down to write, I would either produce a jumbled mess of thoughts and quotations that did not fit together, or I would compose a coherent paragraph that I could not connect to anything else I wrote. As my senior year went by, I felt as if I was falling further and further behind my brilliant, thesis-writing peers. Counterintuitively (or understandably, depending on how you look at it), this feeling of dread led me to procrastinate instead of write.

In the early spring, I realized that if I created an outline, I could work on my big, scary thesis essay without actually writing it. To that end, I split the work that had been going nowhere into two Word documents: (1) a simple, high-level outline that consisted of just a few headings at the start; and (2) an unorganized junk drawer of ideas and quotations from my source material. Outlining quickly became a productive form of procrastination for me. Instead of writing my essay, I would pluck out ideas from my junk-drawer document and drop them into the outline. From there, I would change these ideas, move them around, flesh them out, add to them, or delete them, all without committing to their precise wording or location. Because these ideas were all sentences or block quotes, my outline necessarily became a sentence outline.

Using keyboard shortcuts I no longer remember, I collapsed sections and paragraphs of my thesis outline and moved them up and down to organize my ideas, and I shifted individual sentences up and down to make my arguments clearer and easier to understand. Because I was avoiding the writing phase of my project, I avoided gluing my sentences together with logical-, narrative-, or stylistic flow until I felt sure they were in the right place in the document and in the right order in their paragraph. Doing so took some time to get used to, but granted me a feeling of tremendous freedom as I worked out the essay’s high-level structure and the fleshed out the arguments I was advancing within it.

I didn’t realize until I was finalizing my thesis—when my outline was a 100-page outline full of section headings, topic sentences, and body sentences organized into paragraph-level nodes—that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I had organized my research and my findings in a format that was incredibly flexible, and I was constantly revising it and shaping it into something coherent. By accident, I had finally learned why a sentence outline is useful: It explodes an essay into individual thoughts that are physically separate² and logically atomic³. Doing so makes it easier to evaluate each one independently and—with a good word processor—to quickly group, ungroup, reorder, and move them into place.

In the end, I never wrote my thesis paper. Instead, over the course of a few months, I wrote a sentence outline. I converted it to a manuscript only a day or two before I turned in the final draft. My only edits to it, in manuscript form, were related to applying Word styles to the various paragraphs and adding a title page. The final draft must have been pretty good because it was awarded the Doris Brewer Cohen Award for best senior honors undergraduate thesis in the humanities at Brandeis University.

In grad school and beyond

I went to business school after college, and did not have to write nearly as many long papers to earn my M.B.A. as I did to earn my undergraduate English degree. Despite the small number of major papers I wrote, and despite not remembering the writing process I followed for them, I discovered that I wrote sentence outlines for each one.

After grad school, almost all of my long-form writing has been technical writing for work. While I do not have any old drafts lying around, I recall using outlines extensively to plan and structure my work, but I never again used sentence outlines to draft and perfect it. One reason for that may be that I used different software to write with: mostly plaintext editors, rarely Word (not until I had a first draft nearly completed), and never a dedicated outliner like OmniOutliner. Another reason is that much of my technical writing had to fit into pre-existing document templates that already consisted of many short sections laid out in a specific, required order.

After discovering my longer-than-remembered history of using sentence outlines, and reminiscing about the senior honors thesis project on which I mastered the use of them, I now wonder if I should go back to using them for my larger writing projects.

James Wagner reports for The New York Times:

Major League Baseball canceled the first two series of the 2022 regular season on Tuesday after the league and the players’ union failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement.

After nearly a year of negotiating, including nine straight days of talks between the league and the union in Florida starting Feb. 21, the sides could not come to a new pact by M.L.B.’s self-imposed deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday in order to begin the 162-game season on March 31 as scheduled.

I strongly considered getting back into following baseball after two years away from the sport. Watching Spring Training games on MLB.TV has always been my way to get excited for the both the new baseball season and for the upcoming warm spring and summer weather. Now, with no clear idea when baseball season will start and a shortened season to look forward to, I’m not so sure I want to bother.

I have been doing fairly well at work this month, but I feel kind of terrible about it. I feel like I am falling short in terms of productivity every day. Part of it is that I have been spending a lot more time managing than doing. I am keeping abreast of what my team needs, at the expense of getting my own tasks completed.

I probably won’t be able to prioritize my tasks as well as I would like to for the next two of three months. To regain some feeling of control, however, I will go back to a technique that I have often employed when I am unsure of myself: starting each work day with a journal entry in which I list my priorities for the day.

The poet often sits upon the edge of reason, testing the waters of both sides with both his hyperactive poet-senses and his nightmarishly sluggish normal-senses. Treading both sides for a time, he realizes both of these seas are just as cold and just as briny, but the one just beyond reason is far deeper. With this, he dives in, drinking deep, closing his eyes beneath the surface, coughing up the salt when he bobs up for air.

The internal battle begins between the all-knowing and the not-caring, between divulging too many secrets and sharing too little of what he knows; it promises to rend him in two. This is the curse of the poet. And that of the saint. To see so much, and know so little, and yet grasp an understanding far beyond the rest of the world.

At his worst, the poet sits high up above the world and showers his insight down upon it. At his best, he sits high above the world and pulls the rest of it up to him.

I have been taking a brief, unplanned blogging break. I overloaded my brain last week with too much work, too much programming which led to the same dead end I always end up in, and too little sleep. I also had an important doctor appointment yesterday that I was very uncertain about. Fortunately I am past that and can start to think more clearly again. Overall I am well and am looking forward to the future.

I wasted a ton of time tonight trying to convert some old Apple sample code from an obsolete version of Swift to the current one that compiles. If only I had checked the Swift Package Index first! Of course, someone else had already done it and created a package based on it.

A big success is made up of many smaller ones. A coworker reminded me of that today, and I really needed to hear it.

Modernity is a thin veneer over thousands of years of baser and humbler human history. Almost everything we take for granted today—like electricity, telecommunications, antibiotics, vaccines, knowledge of the internals of the atom, an understanding of DNA, the discovery of plate tectonics, limited space travel, microchips, complex computer modeling, the internet, and so on—was invented or discovered within the span of two or three lifetimes.

When I was a little kid, some of the things I was taught in science class had only been discovered or agreed upon within the past twenty years. A lot more things, such as nuclear energy and weapons, had been invented or discovered in the prior fifty years. As a six-year-old first-grader in the 1980s, fifty years ago may as well have been five-hundred; I couldn’t understand how new everything was around me. For instance, I didn’t realize that my dad had been born before the atomic bomb had been invented. Just today I learned that he was born even before helicopters, which he helped manufacture throughout most of his career, were invented.

It is absolutely astonishing to be alive at such a time, when the past hundred years or so invented nearly everything around us, and we expect new scientific discoveries and new inventions practically every week. It is also very troubling that humans, after only such a short time enjoying the fruits of our ingenuity, seem to be unable to focus on and solve the climate crisis that modernity caused. I fear that thousands of years of baser and humbler human history could return to us at some point in the future if we do not learn to work together to preserve our planet.

When I first started work as a systems analyst I knew nothing about business and nothing specific about systems, but I knew a lot about language. I realized early on in my career that technical and non-technical people approach problems so differently that they are, in many cases, not even speaking the same language. In meetings between the business team and the IT team, I would always either start the meeting, or steer the meeting toward, defining common terms for both sides to use to talk about the problem. It is a tactic I still employ a lot to this day, especially when people seem confused about what the problem is or when the conversation isn’t going anywhere.

Today was my son’s fifth birthday. We had two family parties for him this weekend and all had a great time. He got presents. We ate cake. We spent a lot of time together. The important thing to me is that he knows he is loved.

My son turns five tomorrow. As part of our celebration for him, we all took a trip to Grounds for Sculpture. It is a huge sculpture garden that my kids love to visit.

Part of their fun, which my wife and I can’t fully understand, is that they both bring their nearly-identical stuffed penguin toys there to stomp on some of the sculptures. They have also named a bunch of the sculptures and enjoy visiting them and pretending to have a chat with them.

We have been there four times now, and have discovered new things to see and marvel at every time we have visited. I took a bunch of great shots of the family today, but for my blog I will only post pictures of some of the cool sculptures we saw there.

🎵 I love the album All Mirrors by Angel Olsen. Everything about it is stunning.

🎵 A new album from an old favorite of mine dropped today: Lucifer on the Sofa by Spoon. A straight-ahead rock album is a great excuse to turn up my speakers today.

Tonight I performed some surgery on my color laser printer’s empty toner cartridges and installed knock-off ones in their place. I feel a little dirty, but I saved about $400.

I resent that toner cartridges now have microchips in them that are required for the printer to print. The chips help the printer report its toner levels, but otherwise are there to make a rather generic toner cartridge into into something proprietary and overpriced. The knock-off toner cartridges I bought came with tools and instructions for transferring the chips from the original printer cartridges to them. It was pretty easy to do, and the printer prints in color again with the new cartridges installed.

The printer will always report low toner now, no matter what the toner level actually is. I expect to field questions about it from my family for the rest of my life.

My soon-to-be-five-year-old son is typing…something…into Swift Playgrounds and thinking he is programming. It’s not that different from what I do most days. 😂 At least he is very excited about it.

I am sitting down to watch the final episode in the weakest Disney+ series I have watched so far: The Book of Boba Fett¹. The show is flawed in many ways, but some of it is fun, some of it looks good, and it is, in all but name, a continuation of a show I do like, The Mandalorian.

Last month I started a new, private ritual. Every morning, before I start work or before cleaning up the family breakfast table, I say to myself, “This is going to be a good day.” Sometimes I say it to myself again in the middle of the day when I have a break from work, or when I see the moon or stars in the evening at the start of an errand. I could be imagining it, but I think that doing this is helping me stay positive when things get stressful. It’s my way of saying to myself, “It’s OK. We’re going to get through this. Things are going to end well.”

At my job, we use Webex and Jabber and Microsoft Office 365 for messaging and collaboration, but email is still king. Over the years I have organized my emails by year, project, and client using the various tools that Microsoft Outlook provides: folders (sometimes nested), categories (which are tags with names and color coding), and flags. Recently, I have simplified my filing system to use no categories, no flags, and only four essential folders:

1. Inbox
2. Archive
3. @Action
4. @Now

Inbox is self-explanatory; it’s where all my emails enter the system. From there, I pick out messages that are really to-do items and move them to the @Action folder. I set up a Quick Step to perform this with a single click or keyboard shortcut. I move every other email¹ to the Archive folder. Thankfully, Outlook 365 has a toolbar button that makes this a one-click operation.²

I spend most of my email time looking through the @Action folder, which normally has between 5 and 25 emails in it, for emails related to my next task. From there, I move all emails associated with that task to the @Now folder. I keep those messages in the @Now folder as I perform the task, refer to them as reference material as I perform the task, and reply to at least one of them to complete my task. After I complete the task, I move all the emails in the @Now folder to the Archive folder. If I am interrupted in the middle of a task for more than a few minutes, I will move all the messages in the @Now folder back to the @Action folder.

I try not to let any of the folders, except for Archive, end up with a glut of emails in them for too long. Outlook’s email search capabilities are capable enough to allow me to find anything I need in my Archive folder quickly enough for me not to need to organize archived messages in any way.

Overall, this system has been working well for me and I plan to continue to use it in the future.